The rapid expansion of computing needs, brought about in part by the Internet, has often required enterprises to find more efficient and reliable ways to manage limited computing resources within mainframe computing environments. Prior to the Internet, requests for applications and data usually originated from within the enterprise, therefore managing computing resources was not as important of an issue as it is today. However, more and more enterprises are providing services instantly to customers via the Internet, which has led to a dramatic load increase for such enterprise's mainframe computing infrastructure. Therefore, tools and methodology for managing workload where computing resources are limited have become increasingly critical.
In addition to managing a workload in an efficient manner, the workload must be managed in an intelligent manner. For example, a mainframe may have a variety of pending requests. Requests may include requests for applications, data or both. However, all requests are not necessarily equal and some may be more critical or time sensitive than others. As a result, processing according to the “first in, first out” methodology may not be practical in many cases. Therefore, tools have been developed to allow mainframe administrators and managers to classify requests, wherein a request's classification is a determining factor on when and how it will be processed. In the realm of mainframe computing, requests are otherwise referred to as jobs, as a request represents a job to be executed such as, for example, a database query for all sales transactions during a given timeframe. A series of jobs comprise a workload.
One such tool for managing workloads within the mainframe environment is CA-Jobtrac, which was developed by Computer Associates of New York for the IBM mainframe-computing platform. CA-Jobtrac provides features to allow administrators and managers to streamline administrative tasks such as, for example, scheduling jobs according to application, process period, location or by any combination of scheduling methods. CA-Jobtrac and like scheduling tools typically employ a scheduling library which defines which processes run at defined times as well as any dependencies between the processes. However, these schedules can become quite complex and mainframe administrators often need to track the schedules in order to ensure jobs are scheduled properly and efficiently. It is also important to understand the job schedules and interdependencies of the jobs in the case of a catastrophic failure. If job dependencies are wrongly interpreted, for example, the processing sequence of the jobs in the schedule will be wrongly executed, potentially leading to failed disaster recovery efforts. Traditionally, administrators and engineers have viewed job schedules and manually created flowcharts based on job schedules and interdependencies. However, this is a time-consuming task often requiring extensive analysis of the job schedule.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method to automatically generate job flowcharts. Further, there is a need for a convenient and easy-to-use interface for requesting and configuring job flowcharts and receiving completed flowcharts online, as well as having the ability to download and open a job flowchart in a charting program for manipulation.